Secret Service Study Probes Psyche of U.S. Assassins

With public speculation mounting about what motivated a 22-year-old man to attempt to kill a congresswoman, a little-known study by the Secret Service suggests the truth may be frighteningly mundane.

The study of U.S. assassinations over the last 60 years debunks some key myths about the miscreants behind the attacks. The Exceptional Case Study Project, completed in 1999, covers all 83 people who killed or attempted to kill a public figure in the United States from 1949 to 1996.

“We approached a number of people, many in prison,” says forensic psychologist Robert Fein, who co-directed the study with Bryan Vossekuil of the Secret Service. “We said you’re an expert on this rare kind of behavior. We’re trying to aid prevention of this kind of attack. We’d welcome your perspectives.”

Fein interviewed 20 of the attackers who were still living and sifted old evidence from cases. His goal was to understand the sequence of thoughts, plans and motivations that transformed a downtrodden, but unremarkable person into an aspiring killer over a period of months or years.

Contrary to popular assumptions about public killings, the attackers didn’t conform to any particular demographic profile. But when Fein reconstructed their patterns of thinking, he was able to distill them into a handful of recurring motives for killing a public person — motives that seemed consistent regardless of whether a given individual was delusional or not (and three quarters of those who pulled the trigger were not).

Some hoped to achieve notoriety by killing a well-known person. Others wanted to end their pain by being killed by Secret Service. Still others hoped to avenge a perceived, idiosyncratic grievance unrelated to mainstream politics. Some hoped, unrealistically, to save the country or call attention to a cause. And some hoped to achieve a special relationship with the person they were killing.

Beyond these findings, the study overturns the image of the political or celebrity killer as a menacing stalker. It’s true that politicians and celebrities receive hundreds of threats each year — but those threats come from people other than the itchy-fingered trigger-pullers.

Unlike terrorists, who sow panic with public threats, just 4 percent of assailants in the study warned their targets by sending threats. That silence underlined their desire to fly under the radar, says J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist at the University of California in San Diego who studies public figure killings.

The aspiring assailants often chose between several possible victims. And once they chose, they spent weeks, even sometimes years, planning and mulling their attacks.

Undated file photo of Sirhan Sirhan. On June 5, 1968 Sirhan shot Senator Robert F. Kennedy to death minutes after Kennedy claimed victory in the California presidential primary. /AP

Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, practiced for months at a shooting range. He was seen practicing just eight hours before the killing. And in the investigation that followed, reviews of film footage revealed that Kennedy had been approached by his killer several times in what may have been dry runs in the weeks before his death.

All of this bears on the case of Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old accused of shooting U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords on Jan. 8. “As it has unfolded,” says Meloy, “it’s very consistent with what we know about public-figure attackers.”

Loughner apparently met Giffords at a rally in 2007, where her answer to a question he asked is said to have disappointed him. “If he felt angry and perhaps humiliated,” says Meloy, “that could have been the beginning of the grievance” that eventually made her a target.

Or, if Loughner was driven by another motive — say, notoriety, suicide, or calling attention to a cause — then bumping into Giffords might simply have brought to his attention a local, accessible target, in much the same way that female TV news anchors — locally grown and available for nightly viewing — are also targeted by stalkers.

One thing is certain: In the months leading up to his attack, Loughner slid into decline. Outbursts in class led to meetings with school administrators, which led to his withdrawal from community college. On Nov. 30 he bought a gun.

These meltdowns are common in the year preceding an attack. Nearly half of the assailants in the Secret Service study lost their marriage, job, health or a loved one. That disintegration set them onto another path: The unthinkable gradually became thinkable. The assailant-in-the-making developed tunnel vision around a single obsession — and other opportunities in life seemed to recede from their view.

“Think of people circling the drain,” says Fein. “Before they went down the drain they came to see that violence was acceptable as a way to solve their problem.”

One of the cases in the study was a man named H.J. who during the Reagan and Bush-senior years of the 1980s was troubled by voices that he believed emanated from illegal government satellites. He spent several years buying weapons and making threats to the voices, in hopes that threats alone would quiet them.

Several times the voices became so intolerable that H.J. began driving to Washington with the intent of killing someone. But each time as he drove they faded, prompting him to abandon a bloody errand that no longer seemed necessary.

John W. Hinckley Jr. is shown in this undated photo. A divided appeals court panel cleared the way Friday, Jan. 15, 1999 for Hinckley to make supervised day trips away from the mental hospital where he has been confined since he tried to assassinate former President Reagan. /AP

H.J. eventually arrived in Washington, intent on killing a member of the president’s cabinet, spurring a Watergate-style investigation, and ending the satellite program he had imagined. He was arrested before he got off a shot.

But the Secret Service prefers to spot people like H.J. earlier on, and if possible, guide them to a different path without resorting to handcuffs.

A suspicious letter to a prominent official is likely to generate a knock on the door from two well-dressed agents, says Fein.

Those agents, after sitting down in the living room, are likely to afford the letter writer the kind of polite listening that normally costs $150 an hour in a therapist’s office, as they assess whether he or she represents a threat.

“Far more people are investigated, examined and spoken with than actually end up being hospitalized,” says Robert T.M. Phillips, a Maryland-based forensic psychiatrist who worked with the Secret Service for 15 years to assess people who threatened the president.

Sometimes the Person of Concern is referred for mental health services. Other times the Secret Service agents themselves continue to engage the person with frequent visits and calls.

Fein tells of one letter he read, written by a Person of Concern to the Secret Service agent charged with preventing him from harming a government figure. The letter was addressed: “To Agent Smith, my only friend in the whole world.”

Efforts to turn problem people away from doing unfortunate things don’t always succeed. A woman, called Ms. Doe, cited in a separate study by Phillips, showed up at the White House with flowers for Bill Clinton. Another time she traveled to D.C. hoping to jog with him. She gave no indication of posing a threat, and so was released after each incident.

But after years of frequenting presidential events and sending gifts and love letters, Ms. Doe crossed a line both figurative and real: She breached the security zone around Clinton’s limousine while carrying a cellphone, an item easily mistaken for a handgun.

In light of the danger she posed to herself — and fears that her affection for Clinton, if rejected, might give way to rage — Ms. Doe was committed to a mental ward.

Jared Lee Loughner, unlike the others, was never detected by the system meant to intercept him. His true thoughts leading up to the massacre, if they are ever revealed, will take time to emerge. But history provides some hints.

“The reality of American assassination is much more mundane, more banal, than assassinations depicted [in movies],” concludes Fein in his report on the Secret Service study. These people aren’t especially interesting, he adds: They are “neither monsters nor martyrs.”